21 Comments

So along those lines, why the heck did you compare a well spec'd Opteron 880 against a Low Power L5640. Why not compare it to something like an X5650 that was the bottom proc of the high end family at the time?

I get that, but go back and read the article and you see there are several generalized statements about "processors from then vs processors from now".When making such comparisons they should have pointed out that the differences seen are against a Low Power model and that a normal or high power model would have even more impact on then vs now.Reply

Your "new" Xeon L5640 is already 3 years old. In comparison, you could have gone with the much newer Xeon E3 v2 that uses 22nm Ivy Bridge. You would get even better power efficiency at a much lower cost (currently $200-300) per chip. However, memory capacity may be a problem as you would have to rely on a LGA 1155 server boards which typically have fewer ECC ram slots.Reply

LGA1155 doesn't support dual socket boards; so until about a year ago the older LGA1366 chips (LGA1567 was also available but AT didn't need quad-socket any longer) were the only viable Intel option for their performance target.Reply

Right, I want to run my enterprise on a desktop chip with a Xeon badge.A Xeon E3 v2 is nothing more than a Core i7 with Xeon bading and ECC support.

You want at least an E5 before I will even remotely consider it an Enterprise server.In that space everything is currently on Sandy Bridge EP/EN with Ivy Bridge EP coming around Sept, Ivy EN (why bother really) a few months later, and then Ivy EX (The E7 big boys) either late 2013 or early 2014.Reply

DL585 G7 with 4 sockets can have 4 pci-e bus. A dl380 G7 has 1 pci-e bus to share. The DL360p gen8 has one bus whilst the DL380p gen8 has two pci-e 3.0 bus.

Choices made here can have huge impact on the i/o subsystem when using 10/40gb networking and multiple raid cards. It is very much possible that an older quad-cpu system with 4 bus can outgun dual socket system with a single bus.

"Although die area has gone up a bit, you get 3x the number of cores, a lot more cache and much more memory bandwidth."And that is not taking into account all the features that went from the north- and south-bridge and other chips on the mainboard onto the CPU die. :D Incredible.Reply

Like what? AMD put the memory controller into the CPU Die back in 2006 so the "old machine" has roughly the same architecture that the new machine has because the Westmere based L5640 does not have PCIe controllers inside just like the old AMD Opteron 880. You need at least Sandy Bridge Xeons for that particular feature.Reply